Quotes about ghost
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“Beseeching is a true, gracious, lasting will of the soul, oned and fastened into the will of our Lord by the sweet inward work of the Holy Ghost.”

Julian of Norwich book Revelations of Divine Love

The Fourteenth Revelation, Chapter 41
Source: Revelations of Divine Love

Soul

“This is a story about a family and, as there is a ghost involved, you might cal it a ghost story. But every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at out tables long after they have gone.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

Family, Dead

“There's always a bloody ghost.”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Source: Fool

“Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Capricorn

Source: Tropic of Capricorn

Dead

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

Business

“Hazel frowned. "Why that one?"

"You don't see the ghost?" Frank asked.

"Ghost?" Nico asked.

Okay… if Frank was seeing a ghost that the Underworld kids couldn't see, something was definitely wrong.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

“When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

People

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.”

Karen Chance American writer

Source: Embrace the Night

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.”

Judith Butler (1956) American philosopher and gender theorist

Love, Feeling, History

“We both believe in monsters. But all the ghosts and demons are you. And all the angels and genies are you. All the kings, queens, Buddhas, beautiful boys. Inside you. No one can take them away. (Missing Angel Juan.)”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Beauty, Angels, Boy

“If all people became ghosts my social life would be so over"
- Suze Simon in the Mediator”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Life, People

“Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”

Arthur C. Clarke book 2001: A Space Odyssey

1960s
Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) "Foreword"

Dead

“There's a ghost in this house! An unquiet spirit!"
Unquiet spirit?" Shane said under his breath. "Is that politically correct for pissed off? You know, like Undead American or something?”

Rachel Caine book Glass Houses

Source: Glass Houses

Housing

“Some words were like that. Whole lives attached to them. Ghosts and lives and ecstasy and sorrow.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

“I believe that you've created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

Fear, Reality, Universe

“Look," Percy continued, "I know I'm new here. I know you guys don't like to mention the massacre in the nineteen eighties-"
"He mentioned it!" one of the ghosts whimpered.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Guy

“Are you going to tell me what that was about?” Adam asked as we went back upstairs.

“Sometime,” I told him. “When we're telling ghost stories around a campfire, and I want to scare you.”

Patricia Briggs book Bone Crossed

Source: Bone Crossed

“People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”

Gillian Flynn book Sharp Objects

Source: Sharp Objects

People

“I'm a ghost," said the small figure, then added, a little uncertainly, "Boo?”

John Connolly book The Gates

Source: The Gates

“On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Cats, Horse, Dance

“Rache! Glad you're… Tink loves a duck!" he said, wings clattering. "It stinks of sex in here. God, woman. I leave you alone for one night, and you're humping the ghost." - Jenks to Rachel”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Black Magic Sanction

Love, God, Sex, Night

“Some people will tell you werewolves can only shapechange under a full moon, but people also say there's no such things as ghosts.”

Patricia Briggs book Moon Called

Source: Moon Called

People

“Blood!… Blood!… That's a good thing! A ghost who bleeds is less dangerous!”

Gaston Leroux book The Phantom of the Opera

Source: The Phantom of the Opera

“So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

Hurt

“Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

Source: The Halloween Tree

Soul

“Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, "Que pasa, baby?”

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) American novelist, poet, essayist

Birthday, Baby

“Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

Science

“I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Love

“A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and Holy Ghost on drums.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

God, Universe, Singing

“I was tired of chasing ghosts, hollow men who were outside my comfort zone, men who had nothing to give me except a rush. It was all I asked for, and all I ever got.”

Terry McMillan book Getting to Happy

Source: Getting to Happy

Men

“A kid under a tablecloth insists he’s a ghost. A table
underneath a tablecloth is, I guess, like the rest of us,
only pretending to be invisible.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

“Boo: "Go talk to her."

Callum: "About what?"

Boo: "Anything."

Callum: "You want me to walk up to her and say, 'Are you a ghost?'"

Boo: "I do that."

Callum: "I love it when you get it wrong.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

Love

“Every love story is a ghost story.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King (2011)

Love

“Do you think there's such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?”

Ann-Marie MacDonald book Fall on Your Knees

Source: Fall on Your Knees

People, Soul, Hell, Thinking

“Last night I walked clear down to Times Square & just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost - it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Time, Night

“Nico di Angelo has warned them: the House of Hades would stir their worst memories, make them see things and hear things from the past Their ghosts would become restless.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Memory, Past, Housing

“Well, I make that one murder victim, one police interrogation and one conversation with a ghost,” George said. “Now that’s what I call a busy evening.”
Lockwood nodded. “To think some people just watch television.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Whispering Skull

Source: The Whispering Skull

People, Business, Thinking

“The Shell

The sea fills my ear
with sand and with fear.

You may wash out the sand,
but never the sound
of the ghost of the sea
that is haunting me.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Source: The Mermaid's Purse: poems by Ted Hughes

Fear, Sea

“Maybe you saw her first? Caught a glimpse between the lines, between the letters, like a ghost in the mirror, a ghost in the wings?”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Source: House of Leaves

“Great. So if I saw a guy standing still, and he wasn't wearing an old uniform, I just had to ask him to walk through furniture. If he stared at me like I was crazy, then I'd know he wasn't a ghost. - Chloe”

Kelley Armstrong The Reckoning

Source: The Reckoning

Guy

“If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?”

Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet

Thinking

“Was it like this? (Jesse)
(Jesse made an inhuman ghost noise.)
That sounds like Darth Vader choking on a chicken bone. (Gloria)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dream Chaser

“Silence isn't golden, it's deadly. It's a vacuum that fills up with ghosts.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Silence

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

"Epitaph" from Smart Set (December 1921)
1920s

Home, Girl, Forgiveness

“we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”

Stephen King book Danse Macabre

Source: Danse Macabre

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

“She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Housing

“Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them."

"I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly.

"Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.”

Sue Grafton (1940–2017) American writer

Source: M is for Malice

People, Color

“It's an illusion I've noticed before-- words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.”

Elizabeth Wein book Rose Under Fire

Source: Rose Under Fire

“But I know the difference. Everyone else is a ghost. I exist here alone, stranded by choice. Deserted.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List

“No, he is not a ghost; he is a man of Heaven and earth, that is all.”

Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) French writer

“I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:

18 rooms
$37,000
I’m yours
ghosts and all.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Feeling, Housing

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.
But you’re not dead. I suppose the question must be, are you good?”

Karen Chance American writer

Source: Embrace the Night

Question, Dead

“Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.”

Anne Michaels book Fugitive Pieces

Source: Fugitive Pieces

World

“The best time to talk to ghosts is just before the sun comes up.”

Laurie Halse Anderson (1961) American children's writer

Time, Sun

“The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.”

Helen Oyeyemi book Boy, Snow, Bird

Source: Boy, Snow, Bird

Coffee

“It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came.”

Sarah Dessen book Keeping the Moon

Source: Keeping the Moon

Sleep, Night

“Then he left her there, standing alone, surrounded by word ghosts; things she could have said.”

Kristin Hannah (1960) American writer

Source: Firefly Lane

“When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.”

Aimee Bender (1969) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Light

“That's what living in their world is-a big lie. An illusion where everyone looks the other way and pretends that nothing unpleasant exists at all, no goblins of the dark, no ghosts of the soul.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

Lie, World, Way, Soul

“great gandalfs ghost!
if he had a ghost. i doubt it. he was such a snob…”

Margaret Weis book Elven Star

Source: Elven Star

“He glanced over at me, a smile twisting his lips. "Hey, no advice, Ghost Girl. Guardians should be seen and not heard."
I flipped him off for the "Ghost Girl" comment but he didn't notice because Lissa was talking to him again.”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

Smile, Girl

“Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

Source: Promethea, Vol. 5

Dance

“These problems never seemed to baffle my grandfather nor cause him any anxiety; difficulties which in most people's eyes would have led to endless complications were disposed of by my grandfather almost without thinking, with the easy assurance of a sleepwalker who strolls along a ledge halfway down a hundred-foot precipice—yes, I am tempted to say with the same disregard for the laws of nature as a ghost passing through locked doors.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

People, Law, Nature, Problem

“You didn't lose a child to autism. You lost a child because the child you waited for never came into existence. That isn't the fault of the autistic child who does exist, and it shouldn't be our burden. We need and deserve families who can see us and value us for ourselves, not families whose vision of us is obscured by the ghosts of children who never lived. Grieve if you must, for your own lost dreams. But don't mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we're here waiting for you.”

Jim Sinclair (activist) (1940) Autism rights activist

"Don't Mourn for Us" (1993)

Children, Family, Dreams, Waiting

“Fame is what gets people to go watch your film. I'm just glad to be in a film i believe in. And if it take's fame to get people there, then it's my job. But i'd rather be a ghost writer than have my name down.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

Details Magazine, (1991)

People

“Your art is the Holy Ghost blowing through your soul.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

A misquote. It derives from an interview that journalist Bruce Cook conducted with Kerouac in 1968 and reported in his book The Beat Generation (1971). According to Cook, Kerouac explained to him his method of writing: "I'll just sit down and let it flow out of me ... It's the Holy Ghost that comes through you. You don't have to be a Catholic to know what I mean, and you don't have to be a Catholic for the Holy Ghost to speak through you." Source of misquote.

Art, Soul

“I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.”

Jean Paul Sartre No Exit

Act 1, sc. 5
No Exit (1944)

Tear, Suffering, Hurt

“There are ghosts and there is love,
And both are present here,
To those who listen, this tale will tell
The truth of love and if it's near.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Miss Harkins, Chapter 13, p. 139
2000s, A Bend in the Road (2001)

Love, Truth

“I saw a sheet lying on the floor, it must have been a ghost that had passed out… So I kicked it.”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Do You Believe in Gosh?

Lying

“In our making, God, Almighty, is our Nature’s Father; and God, All-Wisdom, is our Nature’s Mother; with the Love and the Goodness of the Holy Ghost: which is all one God, one Lord. And in the knitting and the oneing He is our Very, True Spouse, and we His loved Wife, His Fair Maiden: with which Wife He is never displeased. For He saith: I love thee and thou lovest me, and our love shall never be disparted in two.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 58

Love, Wisdom, God, Nature

“We're so familiar with written language that we sometimes forget how outlandish a concept it must have seemed to our ancestors. Writing allowed people to copy and transfer their thoughts and their tribal codes of conduct to others, even unto generations they themselves would not live to personally instruct, affect or control. The words themselves must have seemed alive and immortal and as "holy" as ghosts. Written law was thus a way of mastering time and influencing the future, a weapon greater than fire and steel, I hope you'll agree. When read, the written word made the head buzz and ring and fill up with voices and commands from nowhere, as if God Himself had come thundering down through the symbols, off the page and into the room, fertilising and impregnating the mind with his Ghostly, unmistakable presence.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2005
http://suicidegirls.com/words/Grant+Morrison/
On writing

God, People, Law, Hope

“And if a man consider the original of this great Ecclesiastical Dominion, he will easily perceive, that the Papacy, is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: For so did the Papacy start up on a Sudden out of the Ruines of that Heathen Power.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Fourth Part, Chapter 47, p. 386(See also: Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume I)
Leviathan (1651)

“A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: "If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!"”

M. R. James (1862–1936) British writer

Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911); cited from Michael Cox (ed.) Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 337-8.

“I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"Miracles" (1942), p. 25
God in the Dock (1970)

Life, Soul, Thinking, Personality

“Religion has never, in any period, sustained itself except by the instrumentality of the tongue of fire. Only where some men, more or less imbued with this primitive power, have spoken the words of the Lord, not with " the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth," have sinners been converted, and saints prompted to a saintlier life.”

William Arthur (minister) (1819–1901) Wesleyan Methodist minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 321.

Life, Wisdom, Men, Religion

“James — it's about your sister
I wonder if you missed her
I'm on my way to see you but I don't know what to bring
Almost gave up the ghost, now you have what she wants most
a little piece of heaven and a lovely song to sing.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"James (new original song!)" (5 July 2007) http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZQSHT2DcHoU

Love, Way, Sister, Singing

“Good god! Don't do that to me! I'm not in a disposition to handle that - wait a minute. …Uh… Lady…? Are you… Are you that lady, but in ghost -" [Cell phone in background] "Shut up; I don't have time for this!”

Markiplier (1989) American YouTuber and Internet personality

Video game commentary, Calm Time (November 23, 2013)

God, Time, Waiting

“And in these foure things, Opinion of Ghosts, Ignorance of second causes, Devotion towards what men fear, and Taking of things Casuall for Prognostics, consisteth the Natural seed of Religion; which by reason of the different Fancies, Judgements, and Passions of severall men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 12, p. 54
Leviathan (1651)

Men, Fear, Religion, Nature

“And I live with the dead – my mother, my sister [Sophie], my grandfather, my father [who died in 1889, when Munch was in France]... Every day is the same – my friends have stopped coming – their laughter disturbs me, tortures me.... my daily walk round the old castle becomes shorter and shorter, it tires me more and more to take walks. The fire in the fireplace is my only friend – the time I spend sitting in front of the fireplace gets longer and longer.... at its worst I lean my head against the fireplace overwhelmed by the sudden urge – Kill yourself and then it’s all over. Why live? I light the candle – my huge shadow springs across half the wall, clear up to the ceiling and in the mirror over the fireplace I see the face of my own ghost.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

a note from Saint Cloud, 1898; as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 115
1896 - 1930

Spring, Sister, Laughter, Light

“I saw The Mountain Ghost last night and they were really good but also scary! Actually they are called the Mountain GOATS and do not feature scary g-g-g-ghosts. Luckily.”

Ryan North (1980) Canadian webcomic writer and programmer

Blog post http://www.livejournal.com/users/qwantz/32795.html

Mountain, Night

“BE IT KNOWN unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, unto whom this work shall come: That we, through the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken. And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true. And we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown unto us by the power of God, and not of man. And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true. And it is marvelous in our eyes. Nevertheless, the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of Christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God. Amen. OLIVER COWDERY DAVID WHITMER MARTIN HARRIS”

Martin Harris (1783–1875) Book of Mormon witness

Book of Mormon, 1830 Edition, p. 585 (1830)

Men, God, People, Faith

“Jesus Pietro wasn't used to dealing with ghosts.
It would require brand new techniques.
Grimly he set out to evolve them.”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

Source: A Gift From Earth (1968), Ch. 8 : Polly's Eyes

“I felt the body I was occupying so weakened that all its organs were shutting down. I asked the way to the hospital, and as soon as I walked in I discovered the body of a young man who had just given up the ghost. I approached the body and pretended I had seen it move. I protested to all the attendants that he wasn't dead and that his illness wasn't even dangerous. Nobody noticed when I adroitly breathed myself into him. My old body immediately dropped dead, and I stood up in this fresh body. Everyone exclaimed that it was a miracle, and I didn't stop to disabuse them.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Way, Dead

“Ye subterranean gods! whose awful sway
The gliding ghosts and silent shades obey:
O Chaos, hear! and Phlegethon profound!
Whose solemn empire stretches wide around!
Give me, ye great tremendous powers! to tell
Of scenes and wonders in the depths of Hell;
Give me your mighty secrets to display
From those black realms of darkness to the day.”

Christopher Pitt (1699–1748) English poet

Book VI, line 371
The Æneid of Virgil (1740)

God, Secret, Hell

“Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable.”

Gilbert Ryle book The Concept of Mind

Source: The Concept of Mind (1949), Ch. II: Knowing How and Knowing That, (10) Solipsism

Exercises, Knowledge, Problem, Personality

“I ran home [from Cloud's Rest to Yosemite Valley] in the moonlight, with long, firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong. Down through the junipers — down through the firs; now in jet-shadows, now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking rock; past the huge ghost of South Dome, rising weird through the firs — past glorious Nevada — past the groves of Illilouette — through the pines of the valley; frost-crystals flashing all the sky beneath, as star-crystals on all the sky above. All of this mountain-bread for one day!”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (December 1872); published as " A Geologist's Winter Walk http://books.google.com/books?id=OAEbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA355", Overland Monthly, volume 10, number 4 (April 1873) pages 355-358 (at page 358); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 2 <br class="br">1870s

Love, Home, Mountain, Star

“Play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, and let the bells ring, let the bells ring! Play music now: play us a tune on an unbroken spinet. Do not make echoes of forgotten time, do not strike music from old broken keys, do not make ghosts with faded tinklings on the yellowed board; but play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, play lively music when the instrument was new, let us see Mozart playing in the parlor, and let us hear the sound of the ladies' voices. But more than that; waken the turmoil of forgotten streets, let us hear their sounds again unmuted, and unchanged by time, throw the light of Wednesday morning on the Third Crusade, and let us see Athens on an average day.”

Thomas Wolfe book Of Time and the River

Of Time and the River (1935)

Music, Light, Time

“Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
And, if I had the spell
To call the buried — well,
Which one would I?”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Epigraph to "Book Four : Which Travels, roundabout, to edifying and safe conclusions"
The Cream of the Jest (1917)

Dreams

“The ghosts are walking by my side
I feel their love I feel their pride
For I have built a bridge or two
Bridges between me and you.
Hello I love you.”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

"Hello (I Love You)"

Love, Feeling

“We passed the Gardens and turned down Avenue de New York. There, under the embankment trees, I had the unpleasant sensation that I was dreaming. I had already lived my life and was just a ghost hovering in the tepid air of Saturday evening. Why try to renew ties which had been broken and look for paths that had been blocked off long ago? And the plump, moustachioed little man, walking beside me, hardly seemed real.”

Patrick Modiano book Missing Person

Missing Person (1978 )

Life, Dreams, Tree

“There were certain basic things, perhaps—the very earth, itself—which existed through every point in time, holding a sort of limited eternity to provide a solid matrix. And the dead—the dead and fabricated—stayed in the past as ghosts. The fence posts and the wire strung on them, the dead trees, the farm buildings, and the bridge were shadows of the present persisting in the past. Persisting, perhaps, reluctantly, because since they had no life they could not move along. They were bound in time and stretched through time and they were long, long shadows.
He was, he realized with a shock, the only living thing existing in this moment on this earth. He and nothing else.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 11 (p. 87)

Life, Tree, Time, Past

“The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p.12

“Eph. i.6. "Who hath made us accepted in the beloved.” Our being in him is the ground or our being accepted. So it is in those unions to which the Holy Ghost has thought fit to compare this. The union of the members of the body with the head, is the ground of their partaking of the life of the head; it is the union of the branches to the stock, which is the ground of their partaking of the sap and life of the stock; it is the relation of the wife to the husband, that is the ground of her joint interest in his estate; they are looked upon, in several respects, as one in law. So there is a legal union between Christ and true Christians; so that (as all except Socinians allow) one, in some respects, is accepted for the other by the Supreme Judge.(Edwards writes later in the sermon… "What is real in the union between Christ and his people, is the foundation of what is legal; that is, it is something really in them, and between them, uniting them, that is the ground of the suitableness of their being accounted as one by the Judge.")”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Justification By Faith Alone (1738)

Life, People, Law, Christ

“The first Christian who can write decent Latin is Minucius Felix, whose Octavius, written in the first half (possibly the first quarter) of the Third Century must have done much to make Christianity respectable. He concentrates on ridiculing pagan myths that no educated man believed anyway and on denying that Christians (he means his kind, of course!) practice incest (a favorite recreation of many sects that had been saved by Christ from the tyranny of human laws) or cut the throats of children to obtain blood for Holy Communion (as some groups undoubtedly did). He argues for a monotheism that is indistinguishable from the Stoic except that the One God is identified as the Christian deity, from whose worship the sinful Jews are apostates, and insists that Christians have nothing to do with the Jews, whom God is going to punish. What is interesting is that Minucius has nothing to say about any specifically Christian doctrine, and that the names of Jesus or Christ do not appear in his work. There is just one allusion: the pagans say that Christianity was founded by a felon (unnamed) who was crucified. That, says Minucius, is absurd: no criminal ever deserved, nor did a man of this world have the power, to be believed to be a god (erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum). That ambiguous reference is all that he has to say about it; he turns at once to condemning the Egyptians for worshipping a mortal man, and then he argues that the sign of the cross represents (a) the mast and yard of a ship under sail, and (b) the position of man who is worshipping God properly, i. e. standing with outstretched arms. If Minucius is not merely trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible pagans, it certainly sounds as though this Christian were denying the divinity of Christ, either regarding him, as did many of the early Christians, as man who was inspired but was not to be identified with God, or claiming, as did a number of later sects, that what appeared on earth and was crucified was merely a ghost, an insubstantial apparition sent by Christ, who himself prudently stayed in his heaven above the clouds and laughed at the fools who thought they could kill a phantom. Of course, our holy men are quite sure that he was "orthodox."”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, God, Children, World

“Nor would he recognize hope if it came to him. Too much a stranger, too long a ghost.”

Steven Erikson book Gardens of the Moon

Source: Gardens of the Moon (1999), Chapter 13 (p. 399)

Hope

“Winds howl and howl at ghosts of those war's killed—
on soldiers' faces shines the stalking moon.
O men, alive or dead, has anyone
portrayed your faces or invoked your souls?”

Đặng Trần Côn (1710–1745) writer

Source: Chinh phụ ngâm, Lines 97–100

Men, War, Soul, Dead

“The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.
If Tito were to see one of those announcing the very latest, the most recent and terrible news, yet could know that it had always been there, fading, through every kind of weather, unnoticed until today, that might feel something like meeting the old man in Washington Square, beside the concrete chess tables, and carefully passing him an iPod, beneath a folded newspaper.…
Sensing an immense patience, and power, Tito imagined that this old man, for reasons of his own, disguised himself as a revenant from Lower Manhattan's past. Each time the old man received another iPod, accepting it the way an ancient and sagacious ape might accept a piece of some not particularly interesting fruit, Tito half-expected him to crack its virginal white case like a nut, and then to draw forth something utterly peculiar, utterly dire, and somehow terrible in its contemporaneity.”

William Gibson book Spook Country

Source: Spook Country‎ (2007), Ch. 2, Ants in the Water

Way, Feeling, Imagination, Sense

“They [Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear] look at me, and you can see they're looking at a ghost. … Dave said, "She is so much like Kurt." They were all talking amongst themselves, rehashing old stories I'd heard a million times. I was sitting in a chair, chain-smoking, looking down like this. [acts bored] And they went, "You are doing exactly what your father would have done."”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

" Frances Bean Cobain on Life After Kurt's Death: An Exclusive Q&A http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/frances-bean-life-after-kurt-cobain-death-exclusive-interview-20150408" (2015)

Time

“Food, clothing, and shelter are the three evil paths. To desire and make a display of clothing is karma for the path of beasts. To greedily crave food is karma for the path of famished ghosts. To set up a shelter is karma for the path of hell. Hence, if you aspire to part from the three evil paths, you must free yourself from food, clothing, and shelter.”

Ippen (1239–1289) Japanese Buddhist monk, founder of the Jishu school.

"Words Handed Down by Disciples" (Chapter 9).
No Abode: The Record of Ippen (1997)

Food, Hell, Evil, Parting

Quotes about ghost page 2

Quotes about ghost
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